Liebherr Joins Airbus-led Digital Alliance

The Airbus-led Digital Alliance plans to further extend its predictive maintenance solutions to additional equipment and aircraft types, and it is adding a new company to the partnership to drive the growth of its technology.

Aerospace equipment manufacturer Liebherr is the latest industry partner to join the Digital Alliance alongside Airbus, Delta TechOps and GE Digital as they seek to expand the data capability of their predictive maintenance solution, Skywise Fleet Performance+.

“There is an interesting complementary combination between the different predictive models each of the partners can bring onto this product,” says Claude Houver, head of innovation and digital solutions for Airbus Customer Services. He notes that Liebherr will bring its “expertise on their equipment, products and systems to further strengthen the capabilities and the robustness of our predictive maintenance.” Airbus says Liebherr’s addition to the Alliance will extend the range of components it can monitor to “operationally troublesome areas” such as air conditioning and flight control and pneumatic systems.

Citing the recent Airbus Global Services Forecast, Houver says the OEM expects the global aircraft fleet to reach 44,000 over the next 20 years—and these new-generation aircraft will have more data capability.

“We have to invest massively in the value creation of the data, which starts with maintenance. Prediction of maintenance has a huge impact, and we know that we have a lot of cancellation delays due to maintenance, costing the industry a lot of money,” Houver tells Aviation Week Network. “We want to be capable of anticipating failure, and we believe, thanks to the Digital Alliance, that together we’re going to be stronger and accelerate the value of data creation.”

According to David Marty, head of digital solutions sales and marketing at Airbus, the OEM’s Skywise platform has so far connected 11,000 aircraft—more than 53% of the Airbus flying fleet—and collected a wealth of information from aircraft maintenance information systems and sensor data. He adds that the Alliance now has 40 customers using its Skywise Fleet Performance+ platform, such as Allegiant, Delta Air Lines, easyJet, Jetstar, Qantas and SAS.

Marty says easyJet avoided nearly 80 cancellations during July and August this year thanks to its use of Skywise Fleet Performance+, and it reaped additional fuel savings benefits by avoiding the need to fly under minimum equipment list configuration. Airbus estimates that more than eight tons of fuel are saved per aircraft annually due to Skywise predictive maintenance capabilities.

While the Alliance’s technology has so far focused on the A320 and A330 platforms, it plans to extend its predictive maintenance capabilities to the A220 and A350 next year. From 2026, it plans to extend its predictive maintenance capabilities to non-Airbus aircraft.

Houver says the Alliance will also focus next year on making its product more robust. For instance, while Skywise already integrates two artificial intelligence features—natural language processing and machine learning—it is continuing to investigate how AI could be further extended, such as generative AI features.

“There’s a lot of potential to save time and to be faster in decision making, and it’s clearly one of our targets. It has to be combined with human expertise and a lot of validation and testing,” he says. “AI also has to be associated to structural data and [have] a clear data governance behind it to make sure that it’s well organized, well structured and that the data is robust and reliable.”